Caligula: An Unexpected General

Summary

Gaius Caligula reigned for four short years from 37 to 41 CE before his infamous tenure came to a violent end. While much has been written about Caligula’s notorious excesses and court life, relatively little of his military and foreign policy has been seriously studied.

This is a military history of Rome during Caligula’s reign. Caligula had been raised in a military camp (his nickname, Caligula, means ‘Little Boot’. His years as emperor came in the wake of the great consolidation of Tiberius’ gains in Germany and Pannonia, and in large part made possible the invasions of Gaul and Britain that were undertaken by his uncle and successor, Claudius. His expeditions in Gaul were part of a program of imitation of his storied predecessor, and crowning completion of what had been left undone in the relatively conservative military policy years of Augustus and Tiberius.

Caligula: An Unexpected General offers a new appraisal of Caligula as a surprisingly competent military strategist, arguing that his achievements helped to secure Roman military power in Europe for a generation.

The right of Lee Fratantuono to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Contents

Chapter One The Life of Caligula by Suetonius, Part I (Caligula the Princeps )

Chapter Two The Life of Caligula by Suetonius, Part II (Caligula the Monstrum )

Chapter Three The Evidence of Dio Cassius for the Life and Reign of Caligula

Chapter Four Tacitus on Caligula

Chapter Five Josephus on Caligula

Chapter Six The Evidence of Philo’s De Legatione ad Gaium

Chapter Seven The Evidence of Philo’s In Flaccum

Chapter Eight The Evidence of Seneca the Younger

Chapter Nine The Evidence of Pliny the Elder

Chapter Ten The Evidence of the Fragmentary Roman Historians and Additional Sources

Chapter Eleven Towards a Reconstruction of the Caligulan Reign

Chapter Twelve Assessing the Foreign Policy of the Princeps

Conclusions

Endnotes

Bibliography and Further Reading

Preface and Acknowledgments

Another book on the emperor Caligula invites (indeed demands) explanation and justification. For many years, the ‘standard’ English biography/history of Caligula and his reign was the work of J.P.V.D. Balsdon, The Emperor Gaius (Caligula) . This 1934 Oxford monograph revealed something of its intention even from the imperial nomenclature of its title: it would be a serious study of an emperor who was far more complex, and far less crazed, than the ancient treatments of Rome’s notorious emperor from the pens of Suetonius and others would suggest. This was to be a book about the emperor Gaius, not the madman Caligula whose monstrous deeds fill the pages of Suetonius’ life and have grimly mesmerized so many across time and space. Coincidentally, Balsdon’s work appeared in the same year as the historical novel of Robert Graves, I, Claudius – a work that is better known today thanks to British television than to the original (and captivating) novel and its sequel, Claudius the God . There is no question that the general perception of Caligula owes more to Graves than to Balsdon.

Balsdon was supplanted in some ways by Anthony Barrett’s Caligula: The Corruption of Power, which appeared from Yale University Press in 1989. Barrett’s magisterial treatment of Caligula would reappear in a significantly revised second edition of 2015 from Routledge, with the new title, Caligula: The Abuse of Power (Barrett explains in the preface to the second edition that he is more inclined now to believe that Caligula was essentially unfit for office from the start, and that he abused power rather than suffered corruption because of it). The second edition of Barrett was in part motivated by the many books on Caligula that appeared after the first, prominent among them being three English commentaries on Suetonius’ life of the emperor (by David Wardle, Hugh Lindsay and Donna Hurley). All three are invaluable aids for the study of Caligula and his reign.¹

The three major Suetonian commentaries on the Caligula offer detailed notes on the Latin text of Suetonius – an author who has been served splendidly in recent years by the appearance of a new Oxford text of Robert Kaster, complete with companion volume on textual problems in the Lives of the Caesars.²

Barrett’s work is certainly in the general school of Balsdon, though with a more balanced approach to the princeps. Readers who come to Barrett from Balsdon will not find so many ready excuses of Caligula’s behaviour, or so much effort expended in defending the emperor against a hostile historiographical tradition. But the general approach is similar, and the conclusions not vastly dissimilar – though Caligula will likely never find another apologist as devoted as Balsdon.

Some voices have been raised in defence of the ancient tradition of Caligula as insane monster. Here the work of Arther Ferrill holds sway. His 1991 Thames and Hudson study, Caligula: Emperor of Rome, has a neutral title for a book that dismisses the arguments of those who would try to sanitize the Caligulan reign. For Ferrill, while this or that detail of the historical record may be suspect, on the whole the ancient narrative is sound, and Caligula was insane. Ferrill’s book has been criticized by some for being a less than critical assessment of the Caligulan principate, a volume that ultimately takes almost everything said by a Seneca or a Tacitus at face value or as gospel truth. These criticisms are not entirely fair, though in the end Ferrill stands on one extreme and Balsdon on the other, with Barrett somewhere betwixt the two, though far closer to his Oxonian predecessor Balsdon than to Ferrill. Ferrill is in some ways a valuable counterbalance to his more sympathetic predecessors. At the very least, he serves as a reminder that we are possessed of too little evidence about the Caligulan principate to be sure of even the most general lines of interpretation of his reign. Tacitus has been viewed with suspicion by some for not being so removed from the anger and partisanship that he refers to in his own work (sine ira et studio, etc.) – but we sorely miss the Tacitean treatment of the Caligula years. Indeed, we may wonder if it is noteworthy that his principate is missing from the manuscript tradition of the Annales. The simple fact is that as for many luminaries of Roman history, we are missing considerable information about Caligula’s life. All Caligula monographs are probably too long – the temptation to speculate is so great. That said, his reign has undeniable intrinsic interest, and apart even from the perhaps inevitable indulgence in the lurid that his life invites, his reign is of unquestioned significance in the development and progress of the Julio-Claudian principate.

Barrett’s book has enjoyed translations into foreign languages, and Aloys Winterling’s 2003 German monograph on Caligula (Caligula: Eine Biographie) has been translated into English (2011). Winterling is very much in the ‘school’ of Balsdon; like others of the same ‘school’, he finds the story of Caligula’s sororial incest to be suspicious, and he engages in the same rationalization and careful defence that Balsdon practices. Pierre Renucci’s 2011 French language monograph Caligula, for Éditions Tempus Perrin, sees a link between the defects in character attributed to Caligula, and the very milieu and structure of Julio-Claudian Rome. Renucci’s work is very much in the mold of Barrett, seeking not so much to rehabilitate Caligula as to offer a more nuanced appraisal of his life and deeds. Renucci’s study of Caligula follows admirably on his work on Auguste, le révolutionnaire (2003) and Tibère, l’empereur malgré lui (2005), all to be highly recommended to francophone students of the Julio-Claudians (Renucci also has a 2012 Claudius in his series). In Arther Ferrill’s Bryn Mawr Classical Review of Barrett, he notes that exceedingly little new evidence was unearthed in the half century between Balsdon and Barrett: fair enough. The same is true for the nearly three decades since the first edition of Barrett.

The present study is not a scholarly treatment of Caligula in the manner of Balsdon or Barrett. It aims at providing the general reader with an overview of the sources for the life of Caligula, the surviving accounts of ancient writers that reference his reign. It provides a running commentary or explication de texte for those sources, and offers some guidance along the way to points of dispute and further inquiry by providing bibliographical references. It attempts to show that Caligula’s foreign and military policy was, on the whole, relatively sound, and to elucidate how many of the Caligulan initiatives that for various reasons (not least the emperor’s assassination in late January 41) were never seen through to completion but were finished by his successors – something of a belated tribute, at least after a fashion, to the soundness of some of his policies. It hopes, however, to be of interest to more scholarly audiences, if only because Caligula seems to be one of those subjects of unending fascination – a fact that may speak to baser elements in the human psyche. My students are often amazed to ponder that there is not so very much time at all between an Augustus and a Caligula; for them, the fears that may have been very real for a poet like Virgil in the wake of the advent of the Augustan regime came to full fruition in the principate of Gaius. Whatever pretences dominated in the Tiberian Age – at least when Sejanus was not exercising his reign of terror – were completely abandoned under the young Gaius. And the principate would indeed never fully recover. That said, one cannot, I think, escape the sense that the surviving historical record is heavier on the editorializing side than the historical-critical – though the ‘real’ Caligula may have been no help at all in preventing that outcome.

The book before you is not, however, another attempt to rehabilitate Caligula; this has been done, and done well, by those inclined to conclude that the historical tradition is vitiated by a hopelessly prejudiced outlook on the emperor Gaius. As a representative work in that curious genre known as ‘popular’ studies of ancient historical topics, it does not presume to add particularly original thoughts to the vast literature on Caligula. In the absence of new evidence, there is not likely to be much room for innovation in the study of his principate, only of the judicious application of philological, archaeological and historical methodologies to reappraise and re-evaluate what we have. Future discoveries may of course provide for promising new avenues of inquiry.

On the whole, this work subscribes to the Barrett theses on Caligula; those views, we might note, are not much altered between his 1989 first edition and the 2015 second. Much work was done on Caligula in the intervening quarter century, but it is significant that Barrett’s essential views were not altered with the passage of time. Greater emphasis will be found in these pages, however, on the image of Caligula as Julian scion, and on Caligula’s attitude toward the Trojan, Venusian ancestry of his Julian gens.

That said, this book does examine all aspects of Caligula’s life, though with varying degrees of attention. It considers closely the historiographical tradition on the emperor, including the notorious and infamous anecdotes told of him since his own days. Some brief mention is given to the Nachleben or afterlife of Caligula; here, Camus’ play is a gem. Much of the afterlife is unseemly and frankly unworthy of consideration, and is best left to the investigation of the prurient.

The title of this volume is Caligula: An Unexpected General. That title references several points of appraisal of Caligula’s life as a conductor of Roman foreign policy and of at least prospective military operations in Germany, Gaul and Britain. While Caligula was literally born in castris, and was the veritable mascot of his father Germanicus’ troops, he had no military experience in his youth, and on the day he assumed power in the wake of Tiberius’ death, he could hardly rest on the laurels of having achieved anything militarily (cf. Augustus and Tiberius before him). Caligula was thus an ‘unexpected general’ in terms of the military background he brought to the principate; we are told that the names Caligula and Gaius alike grated on him, and certainly the former reminded him of his essentially mock military experience.

The title also reflects the possibility that Caligula was actually quite competent in his military initiatives and planned execution of military and foreign policy manoeuvres, his lack of experience notwithstanding. There is good reason to think that even if Caligula had less than stellar results in his domestic affairs with the Senate in particular, on the whole he was possessed of a good sense of what needed to be done in the arena of foreign affairs (with the singular exception of his relations with the Jews). The ‘unexpected general’ set the course in some regards for the foreign policy of Claudius and beyond.

It is as ever a welcome task to express gratitude to those who have aided in the production and composition of this book. Phil Sidnell, my editor at Pen & Sword, remains a patient and learned guide through the process of turning proposal into product. Caitlin Gillespie was kind enough to lecture at Ohio Wesleyan on Roman Britain and the Boudica revolt under Nero (the subject of her forthcoming Oxford study, Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain); I have benefited much from her work in my research. Alden Smith and Michael Putnam remain much appreciated sources of encouragement and support in the classics community.

Blaise Nagy (now Professor Emeritus of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross) is always generous with his willingness to read and offer wise counsel on my writing. To him I continue to owe a debt of gratitude.

The students of my biannual seminar on the Roman Empire were a particularly delightful group on which to test certain sections of the present work. In particular, I have benefitted from the suggestions and advice of Sarah Foster and Elizabeth Kish. The Roman imperial history students regularly delight in Suetonius, Tacitus and even Dio Cassius; they found the British Broadcasting Company production of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius as wonderful a treat to view as I did when first I saw the late, exceptionally gifted John Hurt perform his classic role as Gaius Caligula. Working with the undergraduate Roman Empire students is a daily exercise in appreciating how stories and legends take hold in the mind, and in appreciation of how the enduring influence of the classics continues to offer priceless lessons for contemporary life.

Once again, one of my volumes is significantly enhanced in quality and aesthetic grace by the work of my freelance photographer, Katie McGarr, of Trek Afar Photography. Katie travelled extensively through areas associated with the reign of Caligula to capture images for this book. She is tireless, devoted to her craft and gifted with a fine mind and a keen eye for historical and archaeological travel photography. Her talent and expertise make every project a pleasure to see through to the finish, and she has my enduring gratitude for her art and labours. This book is in several regards as much hers as mine, not least in terms of the amount of dedication and effort that she displayed in shooting and editing.

Lastly, I am pleased to dedicate this study to an inspirational scholar and mentor. Thomas R. Martin was a professor of mine at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, from the very first semester in which he commenced teaching there in the autumn of 1992 as the Jeremiah W. O’Connor Chair in Classics; under his tutelage I read from Plato’s Crito, Sophocles’ Antigone and then Herodotus. It is a humbling privilege to offer this small token of thanks to Tom for all that he taught me in classwork at Holy Cross, and for the example of his scholarship on ancient history and numismatics, not least his splendid history of ancient Rome for Yale University Press. Ad multos annos, magister optime.

Lee Fratantuono

12 October 2017

Delaware, Ohio, USA

Chapter One

The Life of Caligula by Suetonius, Part I (Caligula the Princeps)

We would be much the poorer in our study of the emperor Caligula if we did not have access to the biography written by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (‘Suetonius’). ¹ Born in c. AD 70, Suetonius is perhaps most famous today as the author of a set of a dozen imperial biographies known as the De Vita Caesarum or (as it is commonly known in English) ‘Lives of the Caesars’. The lives of the twelve Caesars were likely composed early in the second century AD; all of them survive intact, except for the opening chapters of the first (on Gaius Julius Caesar). ² If one wanted to name the principal primary source that survives from antiquity for the life and reign of Caligula, one might reasonably be tempted to cite Suetonius’ life – though, as we shall see, the biography must be used with even more of the caution and circumspection that ancient biography and historiography always demand. ³ At the very least, Suetonius provides the only surviving complete narrative of the emperor’s life. ⁴ It is a challenging source, not least for the lack of ready chronology and convenient timeline, and the relative lack of information about source material and source criticism. But together with surviving material from the monumental Roman history of Dio Cassius, it constitutes the major extant evidence for the short reign of the unforgettable Gaius. ⁵ Indeed, of the Julio-Claudian emperors it is Caligula who has fared the worst in terms of ancient testaments to his life and reign.

We shall proceed first through the first twenty-one chapters of Suetonius’ life, chapters in which the biographer purports to describe Caligula the princeps as opposed to Caligula the monstrum.⁶ These chapters offer something of a survey of the accomplishments of Caligula as emperor that may be considered positive or at least neutral in import; there are shades of the monster to come, but on the whole these are calm and even happy remembrances of a brief period after the death of Tiberius. The early section of Suetonius’ life is as much impressionistic as anything else; it gives both highly specific details of the emperor’s biography, and general commentary and reflection on both his character and the times. It provides a résumé of accomplishments that on the whole might be considered not undistinguished, given the short tenure of Caligula’s reign.

The first six chapters of Suetonius’ life of Caligula, however, are devoted not to its subject, but to commentary on and praise of the future emperor’s father, the celebrated hero Germanicus. Born Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus in 15 or 16 BC, he was known as Julius Caesar Germanicus after his adoption by his uncle Tiberius in AD 4.⁷ Germanicus was the son of Tiberius’ brother Drusus the Elder, who had died in the summer of 9 BC.⁸

One might succumb easily enough to the impression that Suetonius deliberately opens his life of Caligula with an extended praise of Germanicus principally to heighten the contrast between the father and the son. The laudatory treatment of Caligula’s storied father sets the stage for the biographer’s treatment of the child who would be most famous (or infamous) – the emperor Caligula. Germanicus was married to Agrippina, the daughter of the emperor Augustus’ dear friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and his wife Julia (the daughter of Augustus). The surviving children of the union were the daughters Agrippina (the Younger), Drusilla and Livilla, and the sons Nero, Drusus and Gaius.

Suetonius reminds his readers that when Augustus died and the legions refused to accept Tiberius as his successor, it was Germanicus who compelled them to maintain their allegiance, even after he was offered their support in assuming power himself.` The narrative is clear: any future persecution of the family of Germanicus by Tiberius constituted a supreme act of ingratitude and simple bad manners. Germanicus would be dead at 34 of suspected poisoning while in the East; Tiberius was suspected of involvement in the whole affair.

Suetonius notes that two of Agrippina’s children died in infancy, while another – a son – died just as he was ‘beginning to become a boy’ (Latin puerascens – a very rare word). This son was the subject of a Cupid statue that Livia is said to have dedicated in the temple of the Capitoline Venus; Augustus, for his part, is said to have had a statue of the boy that he would kiss whenever he entered the room.⁹ It is thought that this mysterious boy must have been born in AD 11, only to die sometime in the year of his brother Caligula’s birth – a haunting case, at any rate, of how one could imagine what might have been had this older brother of the future monster survived.

From Suetonius, we learn that Gaius was born on the thirty-first day of August, AD 12, the son of a consul. Suetonius is certain of the date; he notes that the surviving sources give conflicting testimony as to the birthplace – he settles on Antium, the modern Anzio in Latium.¹⁰ Caligula’s real name at birth was Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus.¹¹

Suetonius engages in careful historical source criticism for the question of Caligula’s birthplace, noting that Gnaeus Lentulus Gaetulicus put it at Tibur, and Pliny the Younger among the Treviri in Germania (cf. modern Trier). He also cites the evidence of a letter of Augustus to Agrippina that speaks of Caligula being sent from Rome to Germany when he was not yet 2. Antium is the site that Suetonius settles on for the natal place of the future emperor, noting that once he was in the imperial purple, he even thought of transferring the capital to Antium, and that he always preferred the locale to any other for retreat and rejuvenation.¹²

Gaius was born a little less than two years, then, before the death of Augustus in AD 14. His eventual successor – his uncle Claudius, Germanicus’ brother – was born in 10 BC. Rome’s first four emperors were thus all alive between AD 12-14 – a remarkable circumstance. All were members of the so-called Julio-Claudian dynasty, which could fairly be called the first ruling family of the Roman Empire.

It is beyond the scope of this study of Caligula to examine the vast problem of the transition from a Roman Republic to an Empire – but suffice to say that a major problem of the Age of Augustus was the question of who would succeed the great saviour of Rome in his capacity as princeps, or ‘first citizen’. By AD 12, it was clear that the successor would be Tiberius. Less certain was what would happen in the event of Tiberius’ death (and we do well to remember that he was born in 43 BC and was thus already somewhat advanced in age by the standards of the times). Germanicus was an obvious enough candidate, especially given his immense popularity and skilled competence in military affairs. Augustus had had enormous difficulties in securing a reliable succession plan; his decision to compel Tiberius to adopt Germanicus was seen as a sign of great trust and confidence in the young man. If late Augustan, early Tiberian Rome had a celebrity, is was Germanicus. It is not difficult to imagine that Germanicus’ popularity engendered a serious resentment and jealousy in Tiberius. Indeed, perhaps Germanicus was too popular for his own good.

For Gaius’ noble father would die under mysterious circumstances in Syria in October of AD 19, when his son was but 7 years of age.¹³ He died near Antioch, convinced to his dying breath that the emperor’s friend, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, had poisoned him. Piso had certainly been appointed governor in Syria as a means of controlling Germanicus; two men of more opposite temperament likely could not be found. Piso would be prosecuted for maiestas, or treason, if not the death of Germanicus, though he committed suicide before the end of his trial, to the end declaring both his lack of culpability for the death and his loyalty to Tiberius.¹⁴

If anything, the early life of Gaius was inextricably associated with the soldiers his father commanded. To that childhood (indeed infancy) association with the common soldiery Gaius owed the nickname by which he is today best known: Caligula. The caliga was a half-boot that was worn by Roman soldiers; the name ‘Caligula’ is the diminutive of caliga and thus means ‘Little Boot’ or bootikin.¹⁵ We may well assume that Agrippina dressed her infant in a miniature army outfit; the child was the virtual mascot and certain darling of his father’s troops.¹⁶ Indeed, we are told by Suetonius that after the death of Augustus, when the soldiers in Germany were contemplating mutinous revolt, it was the mere sight of baby Caligula which calmed them. The infant had been spirited off from camp to save him from any threat of harm from the rebellious soldiers; the mere thought that anyone would think that they could harm the little boy was enough to quell the disturbance and reduce them to contrition and repentance.¹⁷

The tradition developed that Caligula was virtually (if not actually) born ‘in camp’ with the army. The story about the rebellion of the soldiers and the flight of Agrippina and Caligula is told by the great Roman historian Tacitus in his Annales, or annals of imperial Rome.¹⁸ Tacitus states plainly that Caligula was born in castris, or ‘in camp’; this tradition was also recalled in verses of ‘poetry’ (not to say doggerel) that Suetonius preserves that refer to the fitting birth of the future emperor in the camp of the army.¹⁹ Of the first three emperors of Rome, Caligula certainly had the most ‘military’ upbringing, given both the nature of the times and his father’s career. He travelled with his family to Syria for his father’s ill-fated appointment there; by the time he was 7, he had seen more of the Roman world than either of his predecessors at the same age. It is not the purpose of the present work to offer a psychological study of the future emperor – but there can be little doubt that the dramatic circumstances occasioned by Germanicus’ life made a formative impression on him.

After the death of his father, Suetonius records that the young Caligula lived first with his mother Agrippina and then, after her exile, with his great-grandmother Livia, the widow of Augustus.²⁰ Livia was destined to live until 28 September AD 29, a long fifteen years after the death of her great husband, and an annoying, uncomfortably protracted tenure into the reign of her son Tiberius. Suetonius notes that Caligula gave the funeral oration for Livia; he was then but 17 years old, and not yet of age. This is a decade that in some sense could be called a lost one in the short life of Gaius; we know precious little about what happened to him between the autumns of AD 19-29, formative years of his life to be sure. After Livia’s death, he was assigned to the care of his grandmother Antonia Minor, the younger daughter of Mark Antony; he remained with her until he was summoned by the emperor to his more or less permanent retreat at Capreae, likely sometime after late AD 30.²¹ Antonia would play a significant role in ensuring the safety of the young Caligula in dangerous times (especially given the rise of Tiberius’ disreputable associate Sejanus). Less certain is whether she lived to regret any efforts expended on his behalf.

For the first ten chapters of Suetonius’ life of Caligula, though, there is no hint of the reputation of the ‘monster’ for which the emperor would later be notorious. This changes in the eleventh chapter, when the biographer indicates that even then (that is, at a young age) there were signs of depravity. Caligula is charged with being an eager witness to torture and execution. He is accused of gluttony and adultery (the latter while disguised in a wig and a long robe).²² He was fond of the theatrical world of dancing and singing – activities that were held in suspicion by upper-class Romans, and in which Suetonius says that Tiberius permitted Caligula to indulge, in the hope that they would mollify his savage, cruel nature.²³ It would appear likely, however, that Tiberius had no real hope that Caligula could be rehabilitated; Suetonius credits the old emperor with the quip that he was nurturing a viper for the Roman people, and a Phaëthon for the world.

Phäethon in classical mythology was the son of the Sun, a solar child whose doom was guaranteed when he visited his father to demand some token of his paternity. Given the chance to have any wish he craved, he desired to drive the chariot of the sun for but one day – a wish that spelled fiery ruin for the world, and, eventually, Phaëthon’s own death when Jupiter ended the disastrous ride with a timely thunderbolt.²⁴

In Tiberius’ sentiments, we may see something of a desire to improve his own reputation by a deterior comparison with what would follow him. If Tiberius worried about being hated and about his posthumous reputation, then at least he could rest secure in the knowledge that his successor would be far worse, and that his own memory would seem positive in light of what followed him. Ingenious, cynical – and perhaps eminently Tiberian.

The reality, however, is more complicated. Tiberius had a son of his own, Drusus the Younger, who had been born in 13 BC as the offspring of Tiberius and